hey, asking for help in one of the challenges in one of the schools. You enter a prison room and there is a bunch of straw in one corner and a bucket of crap somewhere else, and I can't figure out how to find the key there.

Hi.

You need the correct capitalisation it's 4Dimensions.org port 6000, otherwise it won't connect.

I think I'll try recreating my character and see how things go, in particular if people can point me to other quests, and hay maybe the new quest journal will help there?

Okay this is craaaaazy!

since I couldn't login as my character, I decided to restart, so have created a new character with the same name as my old one, namely dark, (yeah inventive I know).

That is fine, accept that I'm now carrying several things that I previously had on my old character, even though I've apparently been returned to level one and lost all my xp.
This is nuts!

I think probably what's best to do is delete the character completely and start again.

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spoilers

If you're in that jail cell, you literally just search. You'll eventually find something that will help. It may take several tries.

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spoilers

Dark, a few suggestions:

Ali Baba's Cave
Royal Forest (also an insanely good place for skinning if you kill all the sheep)
Robber Baron's Castle (this one is a little trickier, but quite doable if you're careful)
Victorian England (again, doable if you're careful, and not very much aggro)

Actually, Victorian England is probably my favourite area in the mud. Once it gets going, it's a really interesting storyline, and there are tons of things you can do in that place, everything from side-quests to the main storyline. Some nice gear too. One of the pieces is a deerstalker cap which will help you a lot while questing (I won't say precisely how).
Just one tip.
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spoilers
You will be told to start with the urchins, or some such, when you get the quest rolling. Just don't do it. I wasted literally hours on this part of the quest and there's nothing there.

anyone tried planet jakar the newest Star Wars world? or the second most recent zone? Victorian London 2 which seems darker and has more of a horror element to it?

I want to know what those places are like.

I ran ali baba's cave and completed almost all of the quests there actually, except one I have no clue where or how.

is there a soundpack for this thing, i'd like to try it out, but it's not as good without at least a bit of a soundpack

@Brad what I ended up doing was  to actually delete my character, that reset everything including school quest complete flags etc so when I recreated I can still go from scratch.

doing future zone of the mud school right now. Hopefully I can finish my first remort and get everything so i can move on to more quests.

Btw, I like the customizable prompt. I've got my main prompt now set to show hp, mana and movement as percentages on separate lines, while my battle prompt shows foe's hp percentage then my hp and mana.
I should probably update the db entry to  that 4d has full prompt customization.

@brad, setting up a prompt looks a little complicated but is easy when you get the knack, its something I did in aardwolf and am a fan of  most muds.
Type help prompt for the info.

#Basically you just type "prompt" and then some letter codes depending upon what you want it to say (don't forget to include the percent signs and other punctuation).
So for example, to get my prompt showing percentages of hp, mana and movement I did prompt %x:%y:%z"

The percent x is code for hp as a percentage, (if I wanted the hp value I'd use percent sign and a lower case h), while the colonputs each value on a new line.

I did the same thing for battle prompt using the "bprompt" command (that is prompt with a b).

I personally like values as percentages, since with using realspeak daniel its quicker to here "ninety six, fifty five thirty two" than to get as hole numbers, especially when those hole numbers are in three digits or aren't punctuated in a screen reader friendly way.

Of course, there is a limit to how many percentages are possible to hear and take note of, usually three is the max I can handle, hence why I have my default prompt showing hp, mana and movement (although I might remove movement from the prompt since its probably less critical to be aware of).

Your mileage may vary depending upon what screen reader your using and also what info you think is important to keep track of, still that's why its customizable.

I've now finished all the tasks in mudschool and the prehistoric arena zone, I'll go on to the other three zones next.

I actually find espa a rather more fun class than ranger was, mostly I think because I like the way orbs and spells work in the game, though how well that will translate into different zones we'll have to see, though I would like to finish all the newbie school stuff which should take me to my first remort, or at least it did last time around.

I'll see Jayde. Actually I wish there was a little more direction in the game after mudschool, though I might go and try some professions since I always did enjoy the crafting, trading etc.

I've now finished all parts of the newbie zones accept the robber baron's castle and the final prehistoric zone with the lost child.

Btw Brad, if your still looking for the Android zone newbie flag as a hint you don't need to do anything special to get it, but it is in something of an out of the way corner.

Victorian England is actually written quite well for the most part, and I'm personally not as much a fan of the future zones, personally. There's also a Sword of Truth themed area called the Midlands in the medieval area, but it's mean. Don't go there till you know the game pretty well.

The thing that interested me in the game were the different mechanics and changes in different zones. for example, the space flight and trading in the future, the gardening mechanics in the medeival zone etc.

The problem I tended to find is even for basic activities, the help files could be off, for example it says in the help file on fruit picking you can participate in the grape harvest on a future planet, but when i went there the vines were none reactive objects and the npcs ignored me, also when I asked another player they weren't exactly helpful.

Why have files on crafting activities and then not let you do them?

For the story, I'm content enough to walk into a zone and play around to see what I can find, but if anything interactive other than basic slayage is based on too specific information, I'll probably end up losing interest, as there are games that do hack n slash far better than 4D, and if your going to make all aspects of your game that aren't hack n slash opaque to the point of obscurity I'll probably go somewhere else.

That being said, when the crafting and quests work they can be really fun to do. I really enjoyed the way gardening works for instance, so we'll see what happens when I've finished newbie school and where I might be able to go and what I can try out.